Tips for Better Black and White Conversion using Lightroom PART3

*Bonus Tip – making a pleasant duotone or sepia conditioned picture

Some additional reward tip for you. Adobe has made it super simple to make an extremely decent duotone (just means two tones, go figure!) picture, which incorporates Sepia. Simply go to the Split Toning board after you've done your B&W transformation, it's the fourth one down.

You will see sliders for the two Highlights, and Shadows. My own tip on the best way to keep a decent clean sepia or conditioned picture is to utilize ONLY the Shadows sliders and don't touch Highlights. That will abandon you with perfect, fresh white features even after you've connected the conditioning.

How to create the duotone

First start by choosing the Hue slider (for Shadows). If you want a nice brown colour, start with it around 40-45. Each image tones slightly differently, so start there and adjust to your taste and style. You may notice that nothing happened, right? That is because you need to increase the Saturation slider before the tone will show up. The more you increase saturation, the deeper and more vibrant the colour tone will become. Again, there is no right or wrong, it’s all about preference. For a subtle, dark, chocolate brown try 10-20. For a deeper colour go higher with saturation (NOTE: make sure the “balance” slider is set to zero)

If you want a different tone just move the Hue slider. You can create some really neat affects this way including Blue Tone or a true Duotone.

Example using a portrait
For this final example I’ll show all the steps we’ve just covered using a portrait. This is applicable to any people photos, you don’t need to make portraits to use this information.

Original colour image

Notice the last picture where I've included shading to the Highlights and how it totally changes the look of the picture. The whites have a yellow tint now rather than a pleasant clean look. I for one lean toward the third one yet there are times I do utilize this alternative. Make the wisest decision for your picture, you'll recognize what to do.

A “duo” tone using different colours for the Highlights and Shadows. Shadow settings: Hue 232, Sat 70 – Highlight settings: Hue 52, Sat 37. I did move Balance to -27 to skew the colours more towards the Shadows as well.